[evil.]

What software do professionals use for creating/editing/syncing/ripping subtitles for movies?

 

[pittsoccer33]

Not necessarily film per se, but I have an interesting anecdote.

A few years ago I took a weekend job selling televisions. One night a legally deaf gentleman (he could read lips and had cochlear implants) came in and chatted with me for a while.

He went through what all the caption settings on a television feed are and explained some of the technology for it.

Turns out one of the largest caption providers for tv stations is here in the Pittsburgh suburbs.

Live programming is captioned by specially trained realtime captioners who listen to a program as it is airing and type what they hear on stenography machines, often at speeds exceeding 240 words per minute. These words feed into customized software which transmits the captions to display them live on your television screen.

http://www.vitac.com/news_blog/vitac-blog.asp?post=296

A single captioner, like Adrian, "writes" -- or types the captions -- for the entire broadcast, from the red carpet to the end credits, which means he or she is responsible not only for knowing the names and proper spellings of actors, directors, movies, and fashion designers, but also the possible attendees and current events that might be mentioned during the broadcast. To ensure correct spellings of all proper nouns, the captioner researches such terms and adds them to a "dictionary," or an electronic reference list that has a one-to-three-keystroke shortcut to each preprogrammed term. That way, every word is spelled correctly and efficiently, with nothing lost in between.

 

[evil.]

I don't think you got what I asked dude.

I meant subtitles, as in, those on a Blu-ray disc. There's software called SubRip IIRC that does the ripping. Not sure if it works on Blu-rays though, hence my curiousity about the subject.

 

[bryansj]

I'm not sure the film industry needs to rip subtitles since they have the source. Maybe post what you are trying to accomplish and you'll get a better answer.

 

[Foxbat121]

Not sure what you want to do with it but popular tools like MakeMKV does rip subtitles. However, most BD movies' subtitles are bitmap graphics based, not text based.

 

[evil.]

Okay then. What software do I need if I want to make subtitles (.srt or whatever) for a movie? Let's say, I will rip some English subs and will translate them into Italian. Or make them from scratch. It doesn't matter in what way, what matters is what software does that.

 

[Foxbat121]

.SRT is text based subtitle and easily edited via a text editor. However, since a BD movie's subtitle is bitmap graphics, you will have to OCR them frame by frame into text. Not an easy or even cheap solution. Alternatively, you can google the internet and find the language of your choice of the SRT files and use it directly.

 

[Aleron Ives]

You would use Aegisub. That's what all the anime fansubbing groups use, because it has powerful tools for alignment and timing, and it lets you overlay the subtitles on the existing "clean" video to see how they will look in the final frame. It also lets you control all the font face, size, colour, movement, and karaoke parameters supported by .SSA and .ASS subtitles. You can export to .SRT IIRC, but that's a pretty primitive subtitle format compared to what you can achieve with a modern one.

 

[evil.]

You would use Aegisub. That's what all the anime fansubbing groups use, because it has powerful tools for alignment and timing, and it lets you overlay the subtitles on the existing "clean" video to see how they will look in the final frame. It also lets you control all the font face, size, colour, movement, and karaoke parameters supported by .SSA and .ASS subtitles. You can export to .SRT IIRC, but that's a pretty primitive subtitle format compared to what you can achieve with a modern one.

Thanks. What do you think of Subtitle Workshop and VisualSubSync?

Thanks again for the input.

 

[Aleron Ives]

Both are free software, so that's good. Neither has been updated in a while, so Aegisub appears to be more active. Subtitle Workshop seems like it's designed with similar features to Aegisub, whereas VisualSubSync looks more like it's designed to help you time existing subtitles to a video. Aegisub is designed to help you write subtitles from scratch and is thus exceptionally powerful, but that power means it has a pretty high learning curve. I've never used the other two, so I can't comment as to which would best meet your needs.

 

[evil.]

Both are free software, so that's good. Neither has been updated in a while, so Aegisub appears to be more active. Subtitle Workshop seems like it's designed with similar features to Aegisub, whereas VisualSubSync looks more like it's designed to help you time existing subtitles to a video. Aegisub is designed to help you write subtitles from scratch and is thus exceptionally powerful, but that power means it has a pretty high learning curve. I've never used the other two, so I can't comment as to which would best meet your needs.

Alright thanks mate.

 

[stanger89]

.SRT is text based subtitle and easily edited via a text editor. However, since a BD movie's subtitle is bitmap graphics, you will have to OCR them frame by frame into text. Not an easy or even cheap solution. Alternatively, you can google the internet and find the language of your choice of the SRT files and use it directly.

I don't know about BD, but when I doing DVDs there's a program that will OCR the DVD subs, worked really well. It would ask you to confirm characters, but only once. Since they're bitmaps they're all, always the same (at least for a given show/movie), so once you get through those ~52 (lower and upper case) characters, it just zips through with a perfect OCR.

Of course if you were planning to translate manually that may not be worth it.